This week, some of us from the Technology team are attending the XTech 2008 conference in Dublin, giving a presentation on the technology and ideas behind the redesign and rebuild of guardian.co.uk.

The theme for the conference is 'The web on the move'.

Our presentation showed how our new information architecture fits together, how it's creating many more ways to browse and expose the Guardian's content, how data and services are starting to move out of our infrastructure and elsewhere on the web, and how we are increasingly partnering with third parties to build parts of our site. We'll be showing some of this on inside guardian over the coming weeks.

Many presentations are focusing on how content and services for what we might refer to as a single "website" are increasingly distributed across the web. Technologies such as OAuth, OpenID and open APIs are accelerating this change. This creates great opportunities for new types of web application, using mapping, location based and social networking services.

A practical talk by Gareth Rushgrove discussed the challenges developers are facing in this new world. How to integrate these services where you don't have a formal relationship with API providers. What happens if the provider disappears, changes their service, or is slow, or just not available?

Many of these issues, some of which are currently challenging our team can be dealt with good supplier relationships, proxies, caching, and defensive development techniques.

An example of how people might be able deal with at least one of these issues at the browser level - reliance on a single provider with whom you have no relationship: the mapstraction javascript library allows developers to use the great mapping tools out there such as Google Maps, Yahoo, or open mapping provider OpenStreetmap.

A great presentation by Brendan Quinn and Ben Smith from the BBC showed how they are dealing with some of these issues. I think the most important thing we have learned here is how much we have in common with other online information providers, and that we often have similar strategies for solving these problems.